If you're worried that your characters in Diablo III won't be very customizable, worry no more: Every class has almost a hundred billion different possible builds.

Developing a sequel to an intensely beloved game like Diablo II is one tall order. Hardcore fans of the first two Diablo games will be watching the game like hawks, ready to complain about anything - from the game's color palette on down. One thing they probably won't be able to complain about, however, is a lack of complexity.

The Escapist spoke with Blizzard's Alex Mayberry, senior producer on Diablo III, prior to tomorrow's ceremonies that kick off BlizzCon 2010. With the new overhauled skill system and the different runes that influence them, said Mayberry, one of the team members had done the math to work out how many possible build combinations there were for every class in the game.

The answer he came away with was a staggering 97 billion potential combinations. That's before taking into account any equipment, weaponry, or attribute-boosting gems, too - which will almost certainly boost that number to hard-to-believe heights.

Of course, given the nature of Diablo, only some of those builds will end up being very feasible in the long run. On the other hand, there will always be players who want to try something bizarre and unique just because they can - and they'll have billions of options to choose from.

We'll learn more about the new skill and rune system tomorrow once BlizzCon 2010 begins in earnest.

UltimatheChosen:To be fair, that probably counts "20 points in skill A and 19 points in skill B" as a separate build from "19 points in skill A and 20 points in skill B".

The Austin:It's a shame only about 5 of them will be utilized by the players.Oh well. As for ME:BARBARIAN JUMPING BUILD, HERE I COME!

Remember Borderlands boasting millions upon millions of weapons? Remember what that translated into when playing the game? "Crap, crap, sell it, crap, want this for your hunter? crap, looks neat but crap, crap, okay I can use this, crap, crap, crap..."

I think this is ridiculous hype. Out of all those possibilities we're probably going to see at most two or three viable builds for each character type.

Blizzard, like many other companies, seems to be taking an attitude that simplicity is good. Even in a game as relatively simple and streamlined as WoW they just slimmed down the talent trees and such.

By all accounts "Diablo III" is meant to be approchable, so in the end I doubt it's going to have all that much depth to it in the final equasion. Ridiculous numbers of possible combos involving garbage combinations of abillities doesn't impress me.

I actually suspect Diablo III min/maxing will be down to a science even faster than for most other similar games due to simplification.

If they even had 100 equally viable, competitive builds that would blow the brains of your average mainstream player.

I think that, with skill runes, there really are lots of different build options/variations. Also, in Diablo 2, there were spells that were basically upgrades of one-another, for instance fire bolt -> fireball, or ice bolt -> ice blast -> glacial spike. I don't think these are in Diablo III.

Looking forward to playing every class, really. Monk looks most fun, but the rest look great too. I'd love to play a leaping, smashing, hammer-wielding bearded Thorbarian.

Well if you want to calculate permutaions generally speaking you use factorials, and 14!=87,178,291,200 - so what, they have 14 different options in character creation? Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Diablo 3, but that doen't sound like too many. Even taking long scale (rather than short scale) billions into account, that's only 16 options. Then again, I suppose if that's 14 (or 16) options for each class then that looks a bit more like it.

Eric the Orange:I can only assume this means that stat point allocation is coming back. Because I think it would be hard to get that many combinations from skills alone. Unless there is something I don't know.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking too. It would be an absolute shame if they completely swiped stat allocation under the rug, I mean they could atleast give you a 'hardcore' tick option when you create your player that allows you to do it yourself.

WanderingFool:The first person that says "over 9000" is getting mentally stabbed in the face.

...and I have nothing else to say but awesome.

Just for the record, everytime someone says that it brightens up my day. =[

Sure, billions of class builds, but ultimately they'll mean very little or have several 'uber builds' within a day imo. Not that I'm at all worried about that since I don't play competetively, but with my siblings. So still very much excited and glad to hear this. =]